Revit to 3D print with flat laser cut site

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The original data for this project was submitted by Gary Hartman at Sunlit Architecture. The data was good, but had many of the typical problems that i see when trying to convert architecture CAD into 3D printable CAD.

Typical issues:

The major hurdles of trying to convert architectural CAD into 3D printable CAD are detail tolerances and the generation of a water tight model before export. With this particular project the detail tolerances were mainly too small on the handrails (balcony and stairs). This is usually an intuitive fix because the elements are in plain view and easily fattened so as not to break during fabrication in the 3D printer.

The next hurdle which most often is harder to deal with than the detail tolerances is the generation of a "water tight" digital model. This is so terribly important because 3d printing is typically only possible with solid geometry. When we refer to a water tight model we are literally talking about a digital model that is completely sealed on the exterior. Imagine your model has a center filled with water. As you digitally rotate the model around you do not want water to leak out of the center at any point. Holes in the exterior can often be very small, hidden, and generally hard to seek out. Classic places for holes to hide are underneath roof eaves, door and window installations, unsealed floors, and any time you have adjoining geometry.

The results:

After combing the model for holes and thickness issues the model is ready for export from its original 3D Architectural CAD software (Revit) to one of two avenues depending on the complexity of the model. For this particular project i had simple low detail uncomplicated surrounding buildings that were easily printable after just a little attention in our third party triangle editing program for 3D printing. Some of the high detail proposed buildings were not as easy because they were terribly more complex and i was not able to manually hunt down all of the "holes". As a workaround for this problem i used the CADspan virtual shrinkwarap software to generate a solid mesh from my 3D cad data (www.cadspan.com).